Consumers of medical procedures or services often receive or undergo various services or procedures for healthcare without necessarily being aware of the potential costs of such healthcare services. As recognized by the present inventors, a potential patient may have a need for obtaining an estimate for various healthcare procedures or medical services that the potential patient is considering or will be faced with. For instance, some medical plans give employees a fixed amount of money which the employee may use for healthcare (i.e., $1,000 per year), and if the employee is likely to spend that amount of money or more in a year, then the employer may provide the employee with an option to join the company's medical plan if the employees pays a portion of the cost of the medical plan.
As recognized by the present inventors, in such a situation it would be beneficial to provide the employee with estimates of the cost of treatment of diseases, medical conditions, surgeries, procedures, office visits, tests, or the like—in a simple graphical user interface that a user (i.e., a consumer) can easily use.
Accordingly, as recognized by the present inventors, what is needed is a system and method for providing estimates of costs for various medical procedures, as well as various graphical user interfaces for displaying information related thereto.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.